  "I'm drawn back to it because it was never completed. And it's still not," Meat Loaf explains his passion for the Bat Out Of Hell albums. (Craig Robertson, Sun)
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Bat Out Of Hell albums aren't as rare as Halley's comet, but they're close.
Meat Loaf released the first one in 1977, followed by the second instalment in 1993. Now comes Bat Out Of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose, which fittingly will be in stores on Halloween.
So, a 16-year gap followed by a 13-year gap. Does Meat Loaf, who made lots of other records and appeared in lots of movies during those spans, merely wait for the right moments when Bat Out Of Hell-style music comes back into vogue?
"Oh God, don't tell me that! It can't be back!" Meat Loaf said during an interview at a Toronto hotel yesterday. "The object of the exercise is that we're always swimming upstream! I'm like salmon! Spawning salmon! I have to swim upstream or it's not good!"
Luckily, Meat Loaf has shied away from the title Salmon Out Of Hell. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
The release of Bat Out Of Hell III will be followed on Nov. 4 by Meat Loaf's Bats On Broadway touring show at the cozy Elgin Theatre (one night only in Toronto).
"We're doing (songs) in sequence -- not the whole albums, because then it would be Nicholas Nickleby and we'd be there for four days," he said. "But we're touching on pieces of all the albums in a sequence, Bat I, Bat II, Bat III. It ends with (the song) Bat Out Of Hell, because it should."
Meat Loaf, who will turn 59 later this month, has a busy schedule of TV appearances coming up -- American Music Awards, Billboard Awards, a charity event in England, David Letterman, Jay Leno -- that will keep him busy till mid-December.
"Then we go into rehearsals -- all this just happened, so you get the inside scoop, you're the first person to report this -- then we go down to Florida for pre-productions and we start touring (arenas) on March 1," Meat Loaf said.
A Toronto date will be included, we're assuming. "Of course," Meat Loaf said. "Just not when it's cold."
What keeps drawing Meat Loaf back to the Bat?
"I'm drawn back to it because it was never completed," he said. "And it's still not. (Songwriter/collaborator) Jim Steinman has a blog and if you go on it, he talks about the ending. He was hoping it would be for the 30th anniversary, but it won't be. We're only a year away from that. But they'll start preparing, I guarantee it, before I ever come off the road. We already have two songs, maybe three, for it."
The recently reported legal issues between Meat Loaf's lawyers and Steinman's lawyers are over (see sidebar), so supposedly there will be nothing standing in the way of a far faster turnaround between Bat III and Bat IV. As long as the project has time to breathe, that is.
"In 1978, they were trying to get us to do another Bat Out Of Hell a year after," Meat Loaf recalled. "I'm not the smartest person, but my instincts took over and I said, 'This is crazy. Don't squash this thing. Let it breathe, because it's going to do something that other things don't do necessarily.'
"I guarantee you that even the Beatles squashed some things. Now, time has allowed those great albums to breathe. But at the time, they squashed some things. I would think that if they would have given it a little longer, some of those albums would be even more meaningful than they are. And they would have had more Sgt. Peppers."
Not that the Beatles could have waited a decade and a half between Sgt. Pepper and The White Album, though.
"I think the 16-year separation between Bat I and Bat II was magical, but it's not that I planned it to be 16 years -- trust me, that wasn't in the scenario," Meat Loaf said with a laugh. "But it allowed it to blossom and seed.
"It's like a fruit tree. If you put three different fruit trees together -- I don't know if people actually know this or not -- but if you put a lemon and a lime and a grapefruit tree together, if you leave it long enough you're going to have a tree come up that is a combination of lemon, lime and grapefruit, and it's the worst-tasting stuff in the world."
Uh ... a Sprite tree?
"Yeah, a Sprite tree," Meat Loaf said with a smile. "But this is a true, true story. I know somebody who has one. All of a sudden something seeded and there's this tree that's a lemon-lime-grapefruit tree. And the fruit is terrible, so you don't want that."
Neither Bat I nor Bat II were lemons as far as the record-buying public was concerned. And Meat Loaf insists there's plenty of sweet juice left to be squeezed.
"I know who I am, I know what suits me best, I know what I'm really good at, I know what songs make a Bat Out Of Hell record and I know what songs I can get away with on a non-Bat Out Of Hell record," Meat Loaf said.
"Like my last record, Couldn't Have Said It Better (from 2003). That's a pretty good record. But it's no Bat Out Of Hell III. It's not even in the same league. It doesn't sound the same. Because that's a Meat Loaf record. Bat Out Of Hell is not a Meat Loaf record."
It's almost as if the singer named Meat Loaf and the singer from the Bat Out Of Hell albums are separate guys.
"They are."
